A portrait of a denier: Sheldon Walker trolls RealClimate

While we're trying to cope with this dastardly Australian heat wave, I'm avoiding hard work. Instead, here's some entertainment in the form of a self-portrait of a denier.

I don't know why deniers take offense at being called deniers. After all, all they boast about is how the science is wrong, the scientists are frauds, and they don't "believe in" science. They delight in their denial.

There's an entire post at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT today about how offensive it is for scientists to call science deniers "deniers". The WUWT article is from Sheldon Walker, who's been here in the past to get some tips. On another occasion I wrote about a pickle he got into. He's an odd chap :)

Sheldon Walker gets into a pickle picking pauses at WUWT

Sheldon Walker has written another two articles for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT (archived as Part 1 and Part 2). What Sheldon was trying to do was prove there was a Pause (with a capital P) in global surface warming recently. He didn't manage that, though he thinks he did. What I'm going to show is that in order to pick a Pause, Sheldon had to:

• carefully select a 13-year period for a linear trend (aka cherry-pick)
• avoid an interval just two years longer
• ignore a finding he started out with, that even 15 years is too short to be assured of a meaningful trend
• ignore another finding that non-overlapping trends suggest real differences
• accept that a Pause is not the same as a stop!

Sheldon Walker came to HotWhopper to get help for his WUWT article

As OSweetMrMath noticed, Sheldon Walker came here the other day looking for help with a question he had. It turns out he was wanting our advice on an article he was putting together for WUWT (archived here). I think that's really funny. Do you think Anthony Watts appreciates our assistance? :)

Sheldon wanted to know:

How much of the 2015 temperature increase do you think is due to el Niño, and how much do you think is due to AGW?

He got a lot of help, including from OSweetMrMath but didn't know what to do with it. I sent him over to The Carbon Brief at one point, to where a number of different scientists explained how they estimated the contribution of El Niño to last year's record heat. So over he trotted. Rather than come back to HotWhopper, his next port of call was WUWT where he repeated the errors he made here at HW. Anthony Watts posted the following extremely dumb, extremely wrong claim as his headline to Sheldon's error-ridden article:

Hottest year ever update: El Niño effect in 2015 was 20 times larger than the global warming signal

It was cold in the 1930s, really it was (compared to now)

There's little if any quality control at WUWT. Blog-owner Anthony Watts doesn't have what it takes to do the job, according to his friend Willis Eschenbach. And I'm inclined to agree with Willis, which makes a change, since I don't often agree with him.

Today there's an unsophisticated article that Anthony's posted (archived here). It's by someone I've not come across before to my knowledge, Sheldon Walker. Sheldon is wanting to tell WUWT readers about the change in trends in global mean surface temperature since records began.